Hamilton College Alumni for Governance Reform

How ‘Money Men’ Hijacked a Famous College

Presented without comment.

Thomas Cheeseman, Hamilton 2012, delivered this speech on April 12 to the 2012 to the Annual Colloquium of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. We present the speech below, in full, with the permission of the author and note all copyrights are reserved by the author. We suspect Mr. Roger Kimball found it a formidable act to follow but somehow persevered. Hamilton alumni should read in full and take note.  It’s your college…or maybe not.

It is with great pleasure that I come before you tonight to talk about the Alexander Hamilton Institute. When Professor Paquette approached me, this past September, about speaking tonight I had one reaction: I better be able to produce something worth listening to in 7 and a half months. Of course, true to college student form I did not put pen to paper until last week. However, my unwillingness to begin writing this speech had much less to do with procrastination than a profound inability to articulate what the AHI has meant to me.

I can honestly say, without the slightest hesitation, that the AHI has made the most important impact on me of anything that I have experienced in the last 4 years. In order to discuss the importance and necessity of the AHI I would like to bring in a quote fitting for the current climate of the Academy:

“In this condition, mankind generally flatter their own imbecility under the name of politeness. They are persuaded, that the celebrated ardour, generosity, and fortitude, or former ages, bordered on frenzy, or were the mere effects of necessity, on men who had not the means of enjoying their ease, or their pleasure. They congratulate themselves on having escaped the storm which required the exercise of such arduous virtues; and with that vanity which accompanies the human race in their meanest condition, they boast of a scene of affectation, of languor, or of folly, as the standard of human felicity, and as furnishing the properest exercise of a rational nature.”

This is a quote from Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society, published in 1767, but rings true today. Hiding behind the mask of tolerance, modern academics push their ideologies and marginalize students who object to biased scholarship. The negative impact of those teachers who deem it their job to teach students what to think, rather than how to think, are only re-enforced by a complicit administration. In one case, a student merely was trying to obtain his papers from a certain constitutional law professor. After several attempts to retrieve his papers, all the while suspecting biased scores being the reason the professor did not wish to return the papers, the student was forced to contact the Dean of Students. The male student explained to the Dean that he suspected biased grading, but primarily was interested in having his graded papers returned to him. In an email accidently forwarded to the student between the Dean and the Professor, the student discovered that the Dean had written to the professor:

“Giving the information he needs, I can then tell him that the discussion is over. He would have the option to discuss with the dept chair, but I try to steer completely clear of that next step. Real reasons for grade disputes are rare and must be compelling (as in there was gross negligence). This is not the case here at all.”

Mind you that at this point the Dean had not received any of the documents necessary to rule on the case and yet the Dean had already decided the outcome of the case. So when the student did eventually receive his papers what did the student discover? The professor, striking out against a paper which showed a defense of a position that might be termed conservative with regards to the original understanding of the establishment clause, had labeled a source the student used as marginal. The professor held that State Constitutions from the time of the founding were marginal documents, and were irrelevant to understanding the word establishment in the Constitution; any historian, right, center or left knows that this is an idiotic statement. In the end nothing was done to redress the grievances of the student or the errors of the professor. What this shows is that a professor, caught in an echo chamber of ideology, can have his viewpoint so utterly warped that evidence is irrelevant to his position. Further, it shows students of a conservative disposition that if they wish to challenge a professor they risk their own grades; indeed many conservative students take this as a cue to remain silent. In a landscape dominated by the sacred cows of tolerance and conformity, where truth is distorted or obfuscated to serve ideological purposes, where students are punished for disagreement, how can there be discourse.

            This is precisely why the Alexander Hamilton Institute necessary. Although often caricatured as a right-wing nuthouse by Hamilton professors to students, the AHI serves as a place to discuss ideas. The AHI, unlike think-tanks, accepts all persons of all political stripes to discuss the successes and failures of the West in order to cultivate intelligent and sophisticated positions towards capitalism, democracy, and freedom. Instead of joining the intellectual fad of postmodernism, which relativizes everything and thus undermines the ability of any discussion to occur, the AHI seeks to promote a rigorous examination of western history to understand the crowning achievements of the most prominent civilization in the history of mankind. This rigorous examination of ideas, through the various clubs at the AHI, including the FA Hayek reading group, the Edmund Burke Association, and the Christopher Dawson Society, has not lead conformity; often persons will intensely, but respectfully disagree, in the process discovering the faults in their positions.

The most important feature of the discussions at the AHI is that persons are being educated in the history of the West, where they must confront the empirical reality of philosophical dreams. Whatever one’s positions are, it is uncontestable that the explosion of prosperity in the West occurred simultaneously with the birth of capitalism, that the relationship between faith, reason, and liberty are much more complicated than the ideological positions of the philosophes, that a transcendent standard of morality has long been conceived of as necessary for society, and that a vigilant, manly virtue has long been necessary for the protection of liberties, in a modern age where appeasement, tolerance, and fear  have led to crushing totalitarian nightmares. By educating persons in the west’s history, the AHI enables persons to cultivate their knowledge of our cultural endowment. An education in our cultural endowment and the West’s cultural achievements provides a common basis for persons to have real discourse about contemporary moral and economic matters. By engaging our cultural endowment, these more educated citizens can try to eschew their ideological proclivities and apprehend the intimations of society. Instead of engaging in a rationalist, conjectural discourse which promotes ideologies to the status of truth, the AHI’s emphasis on the empirical realities discards sophistry in favor of truth. By using reason, checked by experience and history, persons are forced to confront how their positions have actually played out. For progressives, they must answer why rationalist regulation and control of facets of society should be respected given the unintended consequences of governmental action, which have lead costs estimates to serially understate the impact on budgets and have led to a continued and aggressive encroachment of liberty. For classical liberals and conservatives, they must answer what should be done about real suffering under current inequalities. Thus, in a non-rationalist manner, members debating within the AHI attempt to discover the intimations of society, providing a basis for their appraisal of proposed policy. There are no silver bullets to the current chilling effects created by the academy, but the AHI provides a forum for interested students to have serious discussion where the branches currently exist, and could provide much needed forums at other schools to which the AHI is considering expansion.

In closing I would like to bring attention to a new project being developed by Dr. Christopher Hill. Dr. Hill is working, in association with the other fellows, on a primary and secondary school curriculum which will provide a real education on the history of the West. This curriculum would be posted online and would be easily available to all students. In order to gets this project going support, financial or other, is essential. First, the website must be created and the materials must be gathered. Once the infrastructure has been assembled it will then be necessary for persons to bring this program to the attention of school boards a crossed the country. Instead of paying $85 per textbook for students, which contain reductive accounts of the past and are costly to replace, the AHI curriculum would provide a low cost alternative, where Ph.D. historians are creating the lesson plans and producing short video clips where they lecture about the subject. This project would ensure a higher quality of education and would further the AHI’s goal of educating persons about the West. Accordingly, the better educated citizenry would acknowledge the intimations of society and protect the cultural endowments which have taken us this far.

As my time comes to an end, both in front of this crowd and as an undergraduate, I look forward to the bright future of the AHI and the persons who have made the AHI possible. I’m sure this will be a great conference, hopefully with plenty of disagreement and little esotericism. Now for the most important thing I can do tonight: finish my rambling and let everyone proceed on to the banquet. Thank you very much for listening to me tonight, please feel free to challenge anything I said, and God bless.   

Tough times in Utica

Readers should start at the bottom and work their way up. We encourage readers to contemplate the purpose, intent, and effort to create & maintain a venal informational monopoly. These professors are fully tenured and have given perhaps a half a century’s service or more to Hamilton and its students.  Yet we see a blackout by Hamilton College of receptions for them.

It is a sad but accurate picture of the administration and those who tolerate it.

______________________________

On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 5:02  wrote:

From:Theodore Eismeier
Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2012 4:36 PM
To: Patrick Reynolds
Cc:Sharon Rippey; Richard Tantillo; Robert Paquette; James Bradfield; Michael Debraggio; Karen Leach; David Smallen; Margaret Gentry; Robert Martin
Subject: Re: Reunion events

Pat:

I regret that some former students won’t know about these receptions, but we’ll get the word out as best we can.

How sad that the current administration is so insecure and petty.

A few weeks ago, I had the honor of being feted in DC by a large gathering of friends, family, and many students, ranging from the Class of 1979 to the Class of 2014. The event made me realize that the real Hamilton is strong enough to survive the strangely Nixonian regime now occupying Buttrick.

Hope and change.

Ted

FYI. I am sharing this note with Hamilton friends and alumni. I encourage those I have cc’d and bcc’d to share with others.

_____________________________________________

On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 1:52 PM, Patrick Reynolds wrote:

Hello, Ted,

we’ve discussed this and decided that we’ll restrict our reunion programming web listing to Hamilton reunion programming.  I hope AHI has great receptions for you both, and which I expect will be advertized on the AHI website. 

I assume you are still not in town today from our previous correspondence —- but if you now happen to be, I hope to see you at the reception we are holding in your honor this afternoon!  After the faculty meeting which starts at 2:30 in the Science Auditorium.

All best, Pat

_______________________________________ 

On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 5:11 AM, Theodore Eismeier wrote:

Sharon:

On May 9, Bob Paquette and I requested in separate emails that the Friday retirement reception for Jim Bradfield and the Saturday retirement reception for me be included in the web schedule of events for reunions. As of May 17, the events have not been listed on the web schedule and neither Bob nor I has received any response from you.

I would appreciate the courtesy of a response.

Thank you.

Ted

You will find it here: http://www.forbes.com/top-colleges/list/

You will likely not find this one in the Alumni Review either.

Alumni need to know this story from the Weekly Standard. For the full story, excerpted below, go to the link.

Who Was George Schuyler? Rediscovering (and reclaiming) ‘the black H. L. Mencken’ by Mary Grabar

A classics professor tells his students not to read The Republic because “only those who watch Fox News” read Plato. Another requires students to apply Latin translation assignments to the “terroristic” war policies of George W. Bush. Another professor dissuades black students from venturing into town to attend a lecture. And one refuses to return a paper to a student disputing his grade.

Malcolm X, George Schuyler, 1964

Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis

I heard these stories from students taking refuge at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, which had been forced off the campus of Hamilton College by such professors. I was spending a month at the charming manse on the village square of Clinton, New York, as a Bakwin fellow. I shared my own stories from graduate school of being punished for pointing out an obvious misinterpretation of a double negative in a book on John Stuart Mill. (The comment on my paper sniffed that the book had been “peer-reviewed.”) My defense of Socrates in a seminar on classical rhetoric led to another professor telling me that I might even like reading the “fascist” Richard Weaver.

That afternoon, in 1993, as I checked out Ideas Have Consequences and The Ethics of Rhetoric from the library, I discovered an intellect of the highest order; yet I found no colleagues with whom to discuss Weaver’s work. There were no panels at conferences, and Weaver was not included in the textbooks from which I taught courses in various English departments. But my outspokenness had invited others in similar situations to write, and it was through this informal network that I was put in touch with the Hamilton Institute and learned about the Bakwin fellowship. Later, as I reviewed the application, I noticed that nearby Syracuse University housed the papers of George Schuyler….

Alumni take note. This posting originally appeared on the Alexander Hamilton Institute Facebook site:

“I know that a few courageous students raised concerns about blatant political bias in teaching/grading with the Dean of Faculty and the Chairman of the Board of Trustees only to have those concerns ignored or dismissed in very cursory fashion. The College has waged a cold war against Robert Paquette, its most vocal critic about these matters. When I mentioned concerns about the lack of intellectual diversity in a Spec op-ed about the contributions of the AHI to student life at Hamilton, I was summoned to the President’s Office to have my loyalty to Hamilton questioned. In response to … [a] suggestion, I have an even better idea for the College: End the cold war against AHI and find ways to partner to give Hamilton a distinct competitive advantage grounded in intellectual diversity, rigorous scholarship, and civic engagement.” –  Ted Eismeier

See the article here.

Excerpted from: http://www.businessinsider.com/university-acceptance-class-2016-2012-3

Below, acceptance rates for the Class of 2016, as they roll in.

• Babson College: 29.0 Percent
• Barnard College: 21.0 Percent
• Brown: 9.6 Percent
• Claremont McKenna: 12.4 Percent
• Columbia: 7.4 Percent
• Cornell: 16.2 Percent
• Dartmouth: 9.4 Percent
• Duke: 11.9 Percent
• Elon University: 51 Percent
• George Washington U.: 32.7 Percent
• Hamilton College: 27.1 Percent
• Harvard: 5.9 Percent
• Johns Hopkins: 17.7 Percent
• Macalester College: 34.7 Percent
• Muhlenberg College: 45.5 Percent
• Northwestern: 15.3 Percent
• Occidental College: 39 Percent
• Olin College: 17.4 Percent
• Princeton: 7.9 Percent
• U. of Florida: 41 Percent
• U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: 25.7 Percent
• U. of Pennsylvania: 12.3 Percent
• U. of Richmond: 30 Percent
• U. of Rochester: 34 Percent
• U. of Southern California: 18 Percent
• U. of Virginia: 27.4 Percent
• Wesleyan: 19.7 Percent
• Williams College: 16.7 percent

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/university-acceptance-class-2016-2012-3#ixzz1qcOi6tyK

Hamilton College presents:

Touré, contributing editor to Rolling Stone magazine and host of Fuse TV’s The Hip-Hop Shop and On The Record, will present a lecture on Wednesday, March 28, at 6 p.m., in the Hamilton College Chapel. The lecture, “What We Can Learn About Life from Hip-Hop,” is sponsored by the Voices of Color Lecture Series and is free and open to the public.

See the whole story here:

 http://www.hamilton.edu/news/story/hip-hop-shop-host-tour%C3%A9-to-give-voices-of-color-lecture

The Alexander Hamilton Institute has done a wonderful thing. Read the article and wonder why Hamilton College is silent on the accomplishments of its own students.

AHI Undergraduate Fellows Participate in Fifth Annual Undergraduate Scholars Conference on the American Polity

Watch this: http://thecfn.org/resources/fight-back-against-censorship

An article in the Spectator, Had Enough with Left and Right? by Peter Cannavo, Associate Professor of Government in which he says:

Unfortunately, the Hamilton community has at times fallen into simplistic political polarities. There have been vitriolic attacks by some alumni (see http://hcagr.squarespace.com/), who caricature the College as a bastion of leftist ideology; at the same time, conservative students have told me of being treated with hostility by some faculty members.”

We submitted a brief and casual response to the Spectator on Feb.8, 2012 (currently ‘awaiting moderation’). We present it below: 

1) hcagr welcomes, and has from inception, corrections of any error in fact
2) hcagr does not manufacture Hamilton’s history. it does not compel Hamilton or its faculty to behave in any particular way. we do on occasion report items that would not otherwise be brought to the attention of alumni who are interested and concerned about the school. some characterize the reporting of events or facts, and some facts that parties at interest would prefer not be reported, as vitriolic. many alumni find such reporting of interest because they would not otherwise know.
3) read the second sentence of the excerpt above [from the Spectator article] again

To Class of 1977:

The Alexander Hamilton Institute will be celebrating Professor Eismeier on Saturday, June 2. The AHI is also establishing a fund to support a Theodore J. Eismeier Fellowship in Political Science.

For information contact bob@theahi.org.

We present an excerpt from a comment posted on this site:

” …mentioned “a professor who in an all-campus email politics every member of the faculty, regardless of discipline, to turn their courses over to the issue of global warming” - that was me, though if I recall correctly I asked that instructors cover it where it was relevant to their course (if I didn’t, that was a mistake) and didn’t suggest how it should be covered. I make no apologies, as I consider global warming an exhaustively documented threat to our nation’s security, our civilization, and life on this planet as we have known it for thousands of years. I don’t consider it an issue of political ideology. I teach anthropogenic global warming as a scientifically established phenomenon and present a lecture refuting the skeptics. Call that institutional bias if you wish, but I would no more consider that institutional bias than if I taught a paleontology or biology course that accepted evolution. What I do also teach my students, however, is that though the science is established, the question of what to do about it and whether to do something about is indeed a matter of politics and ethics. “

December 14, 2011 at 08:43AM | Peter F. Cannavo

A humble consideration: No Need to Panic About Global Warming (excerpted below):

“In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the “pollutant” carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific “heretics” is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2….”

/s/

Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.

January 19, 2012

Re: Anti-Semitism Awareness

The recent rash of vandalism and arson against Jewish houses of worship in Bergen County, NJ highlights a disturbing reality: Anti-Semitism is flaring around the world in new and virulent forms. Writing in The Jerusalem Post, Benjamin Weinthal reports that “German experts in the field of contemporary anti-Semitism define the phenomenon as ‘Querfront’ anti-Semitism, which roughly translates as ‘crossover’. The fusion of hate ideologies coalesces the radical left and extreme right with fanatical Islamism.” We see such crossover in the United States in the strange bedfellows of the Westboro Baptist Church and some elements—small I hope—of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. “For the first time since the end of World War II,” Alan Dershowitz wrote a few weeks ago, “classic anti-Semitic tropes—the Jews control the world and are to blame for everything that goes wrong, including the financial crisis; the Jews killed Christian children in order to use the blood to bake Matzo; the Holocaust never happened—are becoming acceptable and legitimate subjects for academic and political discussion.”

A search of Hamilton web archives reveals no programming—zip, zero, nada— on this important issue, and after months of trying I’ve had no luck getting the Days Massolo Center interested (or even getting the courtesy of a reply). The Dean of Faculty was peeved at my persistence in pursuing the matter with the Center.

With Hamilton’s calendar teeming with events about social justice, diversity, and prejudice, why the neglect of anti-Semitism? On a campus with a political center of gravity far to the left, two explanations come to mind. First, such programming may simply be crowded out by the reigning cultural left’s interest in other matters. Second, as Michael Cohen argued in a 2007 essay in Dissent, for “the left that doesn’t learn” anti-Zionism has become ostrichism or worse about anti-Semitism. “Anti-Zionism,” according to Cohen, “means, theoretically, opposition to the project of a Jewish state in response to the rise of anti-Semitism. Let’s be blunt: there have been anti-Zionists who are not anti-Semites, just as there have been foes of affirmative action who are not racists. But the crucial question is prejudicial overlap, not intellectual niceties.”

In the end, explaining our neglect is less important than rectifying it with serious, balanced programming about anti-Semitism, left and right. I am confident that, if necessary, the Alexander Hamilton Institute will, once again, step into the breach on behalf of Hamilton students. But the Hamilton administration would be well advised to take the initiative on this important, if not fashionable, issue.

Theodore J. Eismeier
Government Department

source: http://students.hamilton.edu/spectator/opinion/p/letters-to-the-editor-1-1/view

[ed -  reproduced here wihtout the author’s permission. He can call if he chooses.]

“Developing one’s mind is no different from developing a strong body: exercise and, specifically, cross training. By studying art, science, the humanities, social science, and languages, the mind develops the mental dexterity that opens a person to new ideas, which is the currency for success in a constantly changing environment” -  AG Lafley in A Liberal Education: Preparation for Career Success in the Huffington Post of December 6, 2011.

If so, why is there no required curriculum at Hamilton College?  Students may graduate without ever having studied the enumerated fields.

Hamilton’s Blind Loop Syndrome is neither new nor a constructive course for the College. EOM

We present below in full the annual letter from the President of the Alexander Hamilton Institute:

From the President’s Desk

December 2011

Dear Friends:

Click to read more ...

Check out the new website at the same address: www.theahi.org

If you think they do good work, please consider sending a donation.  As always we urge you to consider fully the quality & standards of scholarship of all the works of the Institute and, increasingly, of the accomplishments of the students who participate in them.

We also note the Alexander Hamilton Institute announced earlier this year the formation of new subsidiary under the direction of Mike Rizzo of the University of Rochester. Onwards!

The announcement from the Hamilton College: Endsley Performs in Philadelphia

Not sure if these were performed in Philly. Not sure it matters.

Crystal Leigh performs “I am”

Dr. Crystal Leigh

There’s more on google for those seeking further enlightenment scholarship.  One hopes for a case of mistaken identity, and we are open to correction but until then, Carissima!